1,720,981 research outputs found
What’s that you say? Capturing class content through captioning
Get PDFAccessibility covers so many ways that can improve student access to class content. An overhaul of an earlier course can be daunting if you attempt to cover all possible ways at once: color, sound, choice of language, enable screen readers for pdfs and web pages, alt text for images. And keeping content accessible can also mean not triggering or tripping up students with anxiety, time management difficulties, dyslexia, PTSD, or autism. Or those with additional needs for asynchronous materials or extra time to process. In short, there’s no way to bring everything up to speed at once. But each semester I have tried to choose one aspect to improve, to make a couple more students more enabled with each fix. In the past, I’d worked on visual color coding for the syllabus schedule, more readable colors for the slides, and more accessible text formatting for Word docs. I felt I was getting the visibility aspect under control. Most recently, in the spring 2023 semester, my focus was on auditory accessibility, for which I incorporated a combination of running captions in PowerPoint and using a clip-on mic, in addition to the presences of a requested sign interpreter.
My goal was to add options for both speakers of other first languages, as well as those with hearing loss or auditory processing disorders. Class members with a variety of home languages are already a given my department, in both our undergrad ethnic diversity and our range of international graduate students. So, teaching has involved attention to language code, as well as issues of hidden academic curriculum for first generation students. Mixing in with that, this last semester I worked on dealing with the language code in a new way, to make the course content better accessible to students who were deaf or hard of hearing. Like most issues of accessibility, this had the potential to benefit hearing students, since they could also make use of aspects such as captioning.
I felt the need for attending to hearing was exacerbated by my own ongoing use of a mask in class. In short, how could I keep us all virus free, but also able to hear each other? As I have continued to be masked in the classroom, I’ve found that I need to also use a portable mic to help me project. My hope was that some combination of the assistive techniques would assist folks who didn’t realize how much they relied on seeing lips during oral communication. It’s not humble bragging to say that I’ve considered these issues. It didn’t always work.
So. What was added? In my spring graduate writing seminar, one student had already requested ASL interpreters for class. This did not involve work on my part, beyond making sure that the interpreters had a seat in which they could be visible. On top of that, I already do a focused clean-up of captions for any video recordings I create for class. That is, I’ve found that auto captioning is a great first step, but I also work on post-editing them to enable the materials to actually convey the correct names of people and concepts that we’re talking about, as well as providing punctuation to help guide viewers’ reading.
The new element that I tried out in the spring was live captioning during class lectures. How it worked was that while sharing my PowerPoint slides during class through the classroom projector, I clicked the Always use Subtitles option in the top bar on PowerPoint. This allowed the software to capture my miked speech during the lectures, making it visible below the slides on screen. I feel that this is key because the bulk of the course information is conveyed informally, in speech that extends beyond what is captured in the bullets of the slides. Once this is turned on, the subtitles also captured other audible talk in in the classroom, such as the question-asking and clarifications from students during class. In order for the other voices to show up in the subtitles, I found I needed to repeat questions from students before answering, to make sure it was fully picked up by the mic. While this speech-to-text process has many of the same faults as the auto captioning that is attached to videos, it nonetheless provided an extra level of real-time access, at the point where students can ask for further clarification.
I don’t fully know how this subtitling technique went over. The topic of the captioning was not mentioned by my students in our student feedback surveys for that class. So, I don’t have a sense of how this mode affected the majority of the class, who were hearing students. Now that streaming makes up such a big part of contemporary viewing, perhaps captions are no longer remarkable. I am currently debating whether to keep this up in classes where no accommodations for hearing have been asked for. But this next semester I’ll still be masked and miked. My current plan, therefore, is to demonstrate the subtitles at the first class and then create an exit ticket question asking whether students find the technology’s use to be distracting or helpful.  
Mentoring Undergraduate Women to Diversify Wikipedia: An Evolving OER Opportunity
No full textWikipedia is an amazing crowd-sourced OER resource, but research has repeatedly shown that it needs tweaking to include more diverse voices. In both its topics and its contributors, many perspectives are left out: women, people of color, younger generations, the LGTBQ community, and folks with disabilities. It’s a familiar refrain. Fortunately, several organizations are working to remedy this. Taking just the under-representation of women as an example, I lay out where efforts already exist, where they overlap, and where there is more to be done through student contributions to open educational practices to better enable marginalized students to succeed.
This talk highlights the intersection of existing work on improving the number of women as Wikipedia subjects (Women in Red); increasing the representation of women in specific fields; training students as new editors (WikiEdu); and creating a network for mentors of undergraduate women as editors. The latter aims to streamline the coordination of existing resources when editing training is an add-on task for full-time instructors. I discuss how instructors can better succeed at these projects without burning out by deploying existing networks and tailoring them to our students, leading to procedures for openly sharing successful teaching practices. These can assist in generating more varied Wikipedia content that incorporates more diverse, enthusiastic voices. Two long-term goals are balancing the alignment of on-wiki and off-wiki discussions to ensure that editor consensus is maintained and building the pipeline of young female editors through a network of instructors who work with them
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Diachronic Change in The Discourse Markers Why and Say in American English
No full textGenerational variation and contrasts in speech vs. writing are shown in usage of the discourse markers why and say across 20th century American English. Collocating with earlier 20th century address forms (e.g. say, pal rather then say, dude) these forms appear more dated than interjectional markers like oh, well, and so, Further, distinct subtypes of why and say show different frequencies across time. Using corpora of English from different eras, I present a diachronic description of these terms, and show evidence of new terms (e.g. hey and yo) taking over some of the functions that why and say once covered. I trace the disappearance of many uses of why and say from actual exchanges, but not from depictions of dialog, suggesting that while their current spoken usage declines, use in depicted conversations of fiction continues. I propose that this uneven distribution contributes to speakers’ inaccurate sense of the words’ productivity
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Vernacular Explanations of Causation in Lay Health Discourse
No full textFew linguistic works exam vernacular terms for health concepts rather than technical medical terms (cf. Rueda-Baclig & Florencio 2003). The prevalence of conversations on food, sleep, exercise, and illness – and the ordinariness of the words – leads to aspects of lexical misinterpretation remaining understudied. Lay terms with multiple senses are studied here to determine effects on misunderstanding of causality in health discussions
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